AustLit
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Contents
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Unpolished Gem/Gemma impura the Journey from Australia to Italy of Alice Pung’s Bestselling Novel,
single work
criticism
'Alice Pung's Unpolished Gem was translated into Italian in 2010. Giving some examples of the challenge this work of translation presented, Adele D'Arcangelo will try to put Pung's novel in the picture of a wider production of multicultural literature available in Italy. Positive aspects related to the reception of Gemma Impura in Italy will be pointed out as well as the vital and fundamental collaboration between author and translator. The innate potentialities of Unpolished Gem to transform a personal experience in a universal one were doubled by the translation of the book in another language, allowing a wider and more eclectic readership to become familiar with Alice's story, and making its Australian setting overcome the boundaries of language and space.' (Publication abstract)
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A Literary Biographical Exploration of the Transnational Literary Journeys of the Australian Writer Amy Witting and a Lithuanian Migrant Elena Jonaitis,
single work
criticism
This paper explores the genesis and reflexivity of two inter-connected texts, one Elena’s Journey (1997), an autobiographical memoir of a Lithuanian migrant woman Elena Jonaitis and the other, Maria’s War (1998), a fictional novel written by the acclaimed Australian author Amy Witting. The latter text was first conceived from the oral recount of Elena Jonaitis’ experiences fleeing across Germany during World War Two. Witting, an Australian writer in a transnational setting, recognised the significance of Jonaitis’ story, even travelling to Germany to research material for a novel based on the migrant woman’s experiences. Witting subsequently decided that she was too much of ‘a born barnacle’ to write a novel underpinned by places and cultural discourses located outside Australia. Instead, Witting empowered Jonaitis, the other, a woman for whom English was a second language, to write her own story, one of ‘dispossession, endurance, love and survival.’ Soon after, Witting used the life writing of ‘the other’ to inform her own fiction, grounding her novel Maria’s War in Australia by creating the persona of an elderly migrant woman living in a retirement hostel in Sydney, who recounts her war-time experiences to a biographer. Witting commented that both books were ‘tracing the path followed by many Australian citizens and ancestors’. (Publication abstract)
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Reincarnation: The Orientalist Stereotypes,
single work
criticism
'In her third novel The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), Amy Tan uses the notion of reincarnation, which shows her exploitation of the exotic East that reaffirms the stereotypes of Orientalism. The question that has to be raised is whether Tan’s use of the concept of reincarnation to reinforce Orientalist stereotypes is also to be found in those Asian-Australian novels that use the concept of reincarnation in their representations of Australia’s multiethnic society. This paper examines how the Asian-Australian writers use the concept of reincarnation to explore the individuals’ dislocated experiences in relation to their search of identity. I explore the symbolic narratives of reincarnation in two novels by Asian-Australian women writers: Dewi Anggraeni’s second novel Parallel Forces (1988) and Lillian Ng’s second novel Swallowing Clouds (1997). Each novel deals with a woman protagonist who is the reincarnation of a woman who lived centuries ago. Employing multi-settings of the novels in Asia and Australia, the writers have established connections between Western and Eastern cultures in an Orientalism context. In this paper, I suggest that these Asian-Australian women writers attempt to challenge Orientalist stereotypes through the theme of reincarnation in different ways.' (Publication abstract)
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Space and Language in Mr Scobie's Riddle : Translating Displacement into Italian,
single work
criticism
'The relationship between space and language is brought up and questioned in Elizabeth Jolley’s Mr Scobie’s Riddle through the displacement felt by the three male patients of Room One of the nursing home in which the novel is set. The patients desire to go back to the lives they were leading before entering the hospital, and return to their previous homes. Their feelings are portrayed in the novel through an affective description of the spaces they share in the nursing home in which the novel is set and the spaces they occupied in the past. The contrast between indoors and outdoors is a vehicle for the expression of these feelings of displacement. Some key words which describe spaces, such as ‘home’, ‘house’ and ‘place’, are also used to express displacement. They identify different nuances of attachment to or repulsion from a certain space. Due to their primary role in portraying displacement, all of the above elements need to be mirrored in my Italian translation of the novel. This operation is not always easily carried through due to the anisomorphism between the English and the Italian language.' (Publication abstract)
- Writing from the Periphery : The Haunted Landscapes of James McAuley, single work criticism
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Of Frames and Wonders : Translation and Transnationalism in the work of Janette Turner Hospital,
single work
'Author Janette Turner Hospital has been claimed as Australian, Canadian and American. She grew up in Brisbane, travelled extensively as an academic through England, France and India, and now lives in South Carolina. She actively renounces any national ties, and is what some critics would call a “transnational writer”. Her work reflects this ideology, dealing with notions of place and identity in a globalised community.
'The field of translation studies has seen a recent burgeoning interest in notions of spatial disruption in a transnational society. Theorists have questioned where the act of translation sits in relation to the geographical, temporal and ideological place of the translator, locating it in a liminal space “in between” or on a transcended level “beyond”. While Sherry Simon has noted the lack of studies on translation within transnational spaces, the same could be said of studies of Hospital. Just as questions of language can be seen as central to a globalised society, so they can be seen as central to her narratives.
'Taking as a springboard previous work on Hospital which has highlighted links between her writing and the discourse of transnationalism, this article explores how translation functions thematically in her short story “Frames and Wonders”. Ultimately it seeks to present Hospital’s narrative as a ‘tentative model’ (West-Pavlov, 2001) of the relation between translation and transnationalism.' (Publication abstract)
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Australian Literature in Serbian Translation,
single work
criticism
'The paper traces the history of reception of Australian literature in Serbo-Croatian speaking republics of Yugoslavia until 1991 and then its reception in Serbian translation from 1991 until today. The sixty-year period of reception, from the first recorded translation in 1954 to 2012, is divided into 12 five-year periods and the pattern of reception is established and analysed. Concentrating on three distinct spikes of interest and one considerable dip, which can be clearly distinguished in the pattern, the paper seeks to address the following questions: which Australian authors have been translated most frequently or what might have spurred the interest in certain authors and works in particular periods and whether there has been a consistent systematic interest in Australian literature or its presence in Serbian translation is largely the result of sporadic individual efforts. The pattern also reveals that the reception of prose fiction dominates over poetry and the paper, therefore, pays particular attention to four anthologies of Australian fiction which have been published in Yugoslavia/Serbia.' (Publication abstract)
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Traversing the Unfamiliar : German Translations of Aboriginality in James Vance Marshall’s The Children and Phillip Gwynne’s Deadly Unna? and Nukkin Ya,
single work
criticism
'The tendency for Western cultures to emphasise imperial attitudes and experiences in their literature has been described by Edward Said as the primary means by which colonised people assert their identity and the existence of their own history (xii). The tradition of Australian children’s literature, which first grew out of contributions made by European colonisers and largely ignored any indigenous past has been referred to as a “product of colonial history” (Bradford, “Representing Indigeneity” 90) and “a shamelessly racist catalogue of prejudice and misinformation, of superficial clichés, offensive stereotyping and entirely subjective interpretation” (McVitty 7). Historians Robert Hodge and Vijay Mishra use the term Aboriginalism – a variation of Said’s notion of Orientalism – to describe the way in which colonial powers traditionally constructed ideas about the colonised other within patterns of discourse, aptly masking their racist objective and appearing to function constructively (27).
'Focusing on three Australian children’s texts translated into German, this paper examines how the notion of Aboriginality – at different points in time – is presented in the source text and dealt with in translation. While consideration of the purpose – the skopos (Vermeer 1989/2004) – of the translation forming the backbone of contemporary translation theory, the so-called aims of children’s literary translation also cast an important light on the way in which translation strategies are informed. Furthering the international outlook and understanding of young readers remains the most commonly agreed-upon objective of children’s literary translation. In real terms, the execution of this aim often comes down to the decision to foreignise or domesticate. The problem, as translator Anthea Bell writes, is that “one wants readers of the translated text to feel that they are getting the real book, as close as possible to the original”, but which – vitally – includes respecting the foreign aspects of the source text (62). Yet translators of children’s literature (unlike translators of adult literature) have the added challenge of having to negotiate a variety of what Katharina Reiss calls ‘Vermittlerinstanzen’ (intermediaries): parents, teachers, librarians and publishers, who place pressure on the translator (in regards to taboos and pedagogical aspects of the text), so much so that the outcome (i.e. the target text) is affected (7).' (Publication abstract)
