Talk by Dr. Lawrence Venuti, Temple University: Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation

Intertextuality is central to the production and reception of translations, yet the possibility of translating most foreign intertexts with any completeness or precision is so limited as to be virtually nonexistent. As a result, they are usually replaced by analogous but ultimately different intertextual relations in the receiving language. Intertextuality enables and complicates translation, preventing it from being an untroubled communication and opening the translated text to interpretive possibilities that vary with cultural constituencies in the receiving situation. To activate these possibilities and at the same time improve the study and practice of translation, we must work to theorize the relative autonomy of the translated text and increase the self-consciousness of translators and readers of translations alike. To explore these ideas, three cases will be considered: Rossella Bernascone’s 1989 Italian version of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago; Kate Soper’s 1976 English version of Sebastiano Timpanaro’s study, Il lapsus freudiano. Psicanalisi e critica testuale (The Freudian Slip); and Venuti’s own 2004 English version of Melissa P.’s fictionalized memoir, 100 colpi di spazzola prima di andare a dormire (100 Strokes of the Brush before Bed).

Location:

Gallery Hall Taylor Library

Speaker:

Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English at Temple University, Philadelphia, works in early modern literature, anglophone and foreign-language poetic traditions, translation theory and history, and literary translation.He translates from Italian, French, and Catalan. His translation projects have won awards from the PEN American Center (1980), the National Endowment for the Arts (1983, 1999), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1989), and the Guggenheim Foundation (2007). In 1999 he held a Fulbright Senior Lectureship in translation studies at the Universitat de Vic (Spain). In 2008 his version of Catalan writer Ernest Farrés’s book of poems, Edward Hopper, received the Robert Fagles Translation Prize.He is the author of Our Halcyon Dayes: English Prerevolutionary Texts and Postmodern Culture (1989), The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (1994; 2nd ed., 2008), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998), and Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (2012). He is the editor of the anthology of essays, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (1992), and of The Translation Studies Reader (2000; 3rd ed., 2012), a survey of translation theory from antiquity to the present.

More information at http://www.ucalgary.ca/events/calendar/talk-dr-lawrence-venuti-temple-university-translation-intertextuality-interpretation