Salon : romanticism and translation

The cosmopolitan, even proto-globalist character of the period that coined the concept of world literature has now been so thoroughly described and assessed that it amounts to a critical given. Work on national Romanticisms has long been joined by a postcolonial and transatlantic studies, and there has recently been a further expansion to cosmopolitan, global and planetary perspectives which have put decisive pressure on the exclusionary construction of Romanticism as a national or, more often, ‘Big Six’ phenomenon. Amid all this work, however, the question of translation has long remained curiously underexamined. While corrective lines of influence have been drawn that now encompass most of the globe, an examination of how such networks operated on a mechanical level, has often beed evaded, especially where questions of linguistic difference are concerned. Recent publications—by Diego Saglia, Padma Rangarajan, and Kristina Mendicino, to name only a few—suggest that translation is now poised to claim a role of importance, however. Translation particularly opens new ways to establish new and reinvigorate extant links across national or disciplinary traditions, and to inspire a much closer consideration of minor and marginal languages or writers. The purpose of this salon is to informally connect researchers currently working on or towards, or interested in, questions of translation both practical and theoretical, and to discuss initiatives that may help to propel work in this field forward.

Jaar van publicatie:2021