CfP D'Annunzio as world literature: translation and reception

We invite proposals for a panel at the Modern Language Colloquium in Glasgow (UK), which will be held on 17-19 June 2021, on the theme 

D’Annunzio as World Literature: Translation and Reception in the Wake of Decadence 

As recent studies have demonstrated, translation was crucial for the development of the Decadent movement, which originated in France but soon found disciples across and beyond Europe. Among these was Gabriele d’Annunzio, a poet, modernist experimenter and political agitator whose larger-than-life persona dominated the national cultural scene for many years. D’Annunzio’s work spanned genres and media, participating in a rich context of poetry, literature, theatre, and film. He was one of the few fin-de-siècle Italian authors to receive global attention, and remains an “uncomfortable” presence in today’s Italian canon. This panel sets out to examine D’Annunzio’s work within a world literature framework, from his own engagement with translation to the international circulation and reception of his work. Contributions are welcome (but not limited to) the following topics: 

Translation within D’Annunzio’s texts, including:

 — Multilingualism in D’Annunzio’s texts 

• Translingual writing (e.g. D’Annunzio’s writing in French) 
• Self Translation 
• Rewriting and plagiarism 

— D’Annunzio’s theorizing on translation 

• Gender and translation (including gender as a productive category of translation) 
• Immediate reception, including: Fin-de-siècle translations of D’Annunzio 
• D’Annunzio’s translators, their habitus, translating strategies and relationship to the Decadent movement 
• D’Annunzio’s relationship to translators, editors and other literary agents 

— Censorship and political contexts of reception

• D’Annunzio’s impact on modern/modernist writers across Europe and the world Multimedia contexts and responses 
• The afterlife of D’Annunzio’s text, including: D’Annunzio’s place in Italian and foreign canons (i.e. school and university syllabi) 
• Recent and contemporary translations or adaptations of D’Annunzio 
• D’Annunzio’s impact on contemporary texts (i.e. citations; D’Annunzio as a character) 

* Abstracts (250 words) and short bios should be submitted to Elisa Segnini (elisa.segnini@glasgow.ac.uk) and Michael Subialka (msubialka@ucdavis.edu) by August 15th, 2020. We welcome any questions about possible proposals and topics. 

More information about the MLA colloquium can be found at: https://symposium.mla.org/

Source: https://www.avldigital.de/de/vernetzen/details/callforpapers/d-annunzio-as-world-literature-translation-and-reception/

Call for Papers Humour and Self-Translation

Editors: Margherita Dore and Giacinto Palmieri 

The volume aims to explore the self-translation of humour. Generally speaking, self-translation is described as a type of translation in which the translators happen to be the same people as the authors of the source text. It represents an atypical case which, as such, was somewhat neglected by Translation Studies scholars. More recently, however, self-translation has attracted a good deal of attention, as demonstrated by Gentes’s (2020) 212-page bibliography on this topic. Notwithstanding this, the self-translation of humour appears to be a remarkable blind spot. A text search for the word “humour” in the aforementioned bibliography returns only one match (Noonan 2013), searching for “humor” returns one more (Palmieri 2017a), while “comedy” returns three (Palmieri 2017a; Palmieri 2017b; Sebellin 2009; Palmieri 2018) and “comic” returns only one (Cohn 1961). 

Another aspect that makes the research gap on humour self-translation so remarkable is that the translation of humour in general has also been the object of much attention, not least because it offers a wide range of challenges, spanning from dealing with wordplay to the importance of culture-specific references (Chiaro 1992, 2005; Zabalbeascoa 1996; Attardo 2002; Dore 2019). Moreover, the success or failure in humour translation is often constrained by the translation mode used (cf. for instance Zabalbascoa 1994; Dore 2019; Dore, forthcoming). Interestingly, many authors who have written on self-translation (e.g. Fitch 1988; Eco 2013) have stressed that self-translators enjoy a level of freedom greater than that allowed to allographic translators. Similarly, the challenging nature of humour translation makes the case of self-translation the more interesting and intriguing, as it often requires exercising great freedom in adapting the humours content to the target audience (as discussed, with reference to stand-up comedy, in Palmieri 2018). Therefore, observing specific cases of humour self-translation is likely to unveil specific characteristics of this process in different context (cf. e.g. Palmieri 2018) and of humour translation in general. 

It is envisaged that the exploration of this fascinating phenomenon will further contribute to enhance the ongoing debate on the (un)translatability of humour (Delabastita 1996; 1997; Chiaro 2000; Dore 2019). Since the self-translation of humour can potentially cover several fields of enquire and application, as well as genres, an edited book can become a particularly promising tool. With these premises in mind, we would like to launch a Call for Papers to encourage scholars to give a contribution to mapping this problem space, by identifying instances of humour self-translation in their specific areas of competence, both in terms of language(s) and medium/ text type.

The papers will be peer-reviewed. Authors will be asked to send their contributions to both Margherita Dore (margherita.dore@uniroma1.it) and Giacinto Palmieri (g.palmieri@londonmet.ac.uk).

Timeline
30th June 2020 – Abstracts (300 words) 

Notification of acceptance: 31/07/2020 

End of January 2021 – Manuscripts of chapters (up to 8,000 words) 

End of March 2021 – Feedback from editors/external readers 

End of May 2021 – Final manuscripts 

Length of contributions: 8.000 words
Please use British spelling.

For a list of references see: https://www.sisubakercentre.org/2020/05/19/cfp-humour-and-self-translation/