Deadline: January 30, 2019
Poetry Translation East-West by Zakhar Ishov and Michał Mrugalski
Poetry translation is perpetually enveloped in a paradox: on the one hand, “poetry is what gets lost in translation” (Frost 1995, Croce 1926, Jakobson 1959); on the other, practiced since antiquity, poetry translation has been universally a major moving force behind cultural transfer (Highet 1957, Steiner 1975: 251, Venclova 1979).
In this special themed issue of Przekładaniec we will consider the cultural history, theory and practice of poetry translation in the Slavic context, especially the transfer between Slavic literatures and languages and Western ones. This space is fraught with tensions and contrasts, but sometimes also with parallels and overlaps from grammatical to prosodic ones, from cultural to political, etc. etc. The dichotomy of translatability-untranslatability implies a continuous “accretion of meaning in the process of translational transformations” (Lotman 1990: 3). Each poetic “rewriting” (Lefevre 1992) of texts presupposes an equivalent rewriting of theories as well (Flotow 2000; Munday 2007; Venuti 2013). Therefore, we invite proposals that deal not only with Western-Slavic practices of poetry translation, but also Slavic translation theories. Continue reading “CFP: Przekładaniec Journal of Translation Studies (Krakow)”
The involvement of Kurdish forces during the Crimean War inaugurated the political and military encounter of Russians and Kurds between Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Since then, these relations have formed an important and disputed aspect of Russian, and later Soviet, policies in the Middle East. Most significantly, these policies have extended well beyond the clash of the Tsarist and Ottoman Empires at the turn of the 20th century.While Russian and Soviet policies have included a sustained focus on the role of the Kurds, their political mobilization and activism in the 1920s-1930s and during the Cold War, the relationship has never been a simple one. It was deeply entangled in the nexus of regional politics and Russian/Soviet policies toward Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, as well as in global dynamics. Conversely, mobilities and alliances with the ‘’East’’ have been important in shaping political identities, but remain a still understudied part of Kurdish political strategies on the international arena.