This international and interdisciplinary volume explores the relations between translation, migration, and memory. It brings together humanities researchers from a range of disciplines including history, museum studies, memory studies, translation studies, and literary, cultural, and media studies to examine memory and migration through the interconnecting lens of translation. The innovatory perspective adopted by Translating Worlds understands translation’s explanatory reach as extending beyond the comprehension of one language by another to encompass those complex and multi-layered processes of parsing by means of which the unfamiliar and the familiar, the old home and the new are brought into conversation and connection.
Themes discussed include:
- How memories of lost homes act as aids or hindrances to homemaking in new worlds.
- How cultural memories are translated in new cultural contexts.
- Migration, affect, memory, and translation.
- Migration, language, and transcultural memory.
- Migration, traumatic memory, and translation.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Translating Worlds: Approaching migration through Memory and Translation Studies; Part 1: Migrating and Translating Memory across Multiple Fields; 1. The Lost Clock: Remembering and Translating Enigmatic Messages from Migrant Objects; 2. Tactile Translations: Re-Locating the Northern Irish Disappeared; 3. The Past in the Present: Life Narratives and Trauma in the Vietnamese Diaspora; 4. Beyond the Written: Embodying the Sensorial as an Act of Remembering; 5. ‘Having Left, Not Having—Yet—Arrived’: Migrant Interiority, Translation, and Memory’; Part 2: Translating and Migrating Languages, Ideologies, and Identities; 6. ‘There Was a Woman, a Translator, Who Wanted to Be Another Person’: Jhumpa Lahiri and the Exchange Politics of Linguistic Exile; 7. Foiba: Genealogy of an Untranslatable Word; 8. Translating Australia: Language, Migrant Education, and Television; 9. Can We Talk About Poland?: Intergenerational Translations of Home; 10. Changing Places: Translational Narratives of Migration, Cultural Memory, and Belonging
About the Author :
Susannah Radstone is currently Adjunct Professor of Cultural Theory in the School of Historical, Philosophical and International Studies, Monash University and Honorary Principal Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research in Memory Studies has been widely published. Her current research includes a collaborative exploration of aspects of Australian culture that challenge European Memory Studies. She is currently completing a monograph titled Getting Over Trauma, and, since arriving in Australia she has begun work on a semi-autobiographical book linked to her own migration.
Rita Wilson is Professor of Translation Studies at Monash University. Her current work contributes to a growing strand of research in Translation Studies that explores the connection between migrant cultural studies, translation, and intercultural studies. She is co-editor of the internationally renowned journal The Translator and Academic Co-Director of the Monash-Warwick Migration, Identity, Translation Research Network.
Review :
Translating Worlds deliberately aims to extend the more traditional reach of translation to encompass complex and multilayered processes that include conversations and connections between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the migrants' old home and their new one.
Christophe Declercq, KU Leuven, Utrecht University
Translating Worlds is intended for graduate students, post-graduate students, and academia in general. The authors made ground-breaking work on Memory Studies and Translation Studies and are personally engaged through reflection that conjures an exploration of traumas of the past, healing, affection, and their personal concept of homes for migrants. I recommend this book for humanities and social science researchers. This edited collection will be of interest to a wide range of scholars working in the interdisciplinary studies of humanities and social sciences.
Marco René Flores, PhD Candidate in Social Justice, University College Dublin, Ireland
