Since the early 1990s, the rapidly growing field of Translation Studies has come to represent a major interdisciplinary turn in the study of language and literature within and beyond Europe. Translation Studies has now emerged as a new hermeneutic axis in comparative literature and cultural studies, as proliferating journals and monograph series in the US, UK, Spain, Holland and China will testify. For the most part, however, these developments are largely taking place outside the orbit of Middle Eastern Studies, thus effectively isolating the study of the region’s literary cultures from historical and theoretical developments in the field, as well as from a dynamic new axis of critical comparativism in the humanities at large.
The aim of this two-day workshop was to take a first step in addressing this lacuna by assembling scholars working within a variety of textual and translational traditions - most prominently, those of the Middle East – to explore issues related to literary history and sociology, poetics of genre, cultural studies and philosophy.
The specific focus of the workshop was the dynamic but often invisible political, aesthetic and epistemological links between literary culture, translation and identity-formation within and without the dominant Nation-State structures of modernity – modernity here being itself understood as a major topos of translation. The workshop did not however, limit itself to the modern period. Seminal translation moments of the classical and medieval worlds were examined in relation to contemporary critical discourses on (trans)nationalism and globalization.
Schedule:
Monday, June 18
10 am — 10.30 am
Samah Selim (IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence), Opening Remarks
10.30 am — 12.30 pm
Session 1
Mona Baker (Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester), Virtual Resistance: Activist Communities of Translators and Violent Conflict in the Middle East
Richard Jacquemond (Université d’Aix en provence), Nation Building and Translation Policies in the Arab World.
Moderator: Samia Mehrez
1.30 pm — 3.30 pm
Session 2
Mona Tolba (Université Charles de Gaulle, Lille 3), Les problèmes linguistiques de la réception de la traduction de Derrida en Egypte
Anwar Mogith (Helwan University), Les préoccupations politiques et la réception des la pensée européenne dans le monde arabe: Le cas de Derrida
Chair: Richard Jacquemond
4 pm — 6 pm
Session 3
Erol Köroğlu (Boğazici University, Fellow of EUME, 2006/7), Lost in Nationalist Translation: Configurations, Appropriations and Translations of History in Adivar’s ‘The Shirt of Flame’
Samia Mehrez (American University in Cairo), Translating Gender between the Local and the Global
Chair: Shaden Tageldin
Tuesday, June 19
10.30 — 12.30 pm
Session 4
Shaden Tageldin (University of Minnesota, Fellow of EUME 2006/7), The Idea of Order at Cairo: Nation-Formation and the Imperial Urge toward Translatability
Nergis Erturk (Binghamton Univeristy, SUNY), Translating into Ottoman
Chair: Erol Köroğlu
1.30 pm — 3.30 pm
Session 5
Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar (Boğaziçi University), Translating the ‘Popular’ in Early Republican Turkey
Sameh F. Hanna (University College London), Translation and nation: Translators’ agency and the dictates of cultural production
Chair: Samah Selim
4 pm — 6 pm
Session 6
Michael Beard (University of North Dakota), Sîn is for safari
Sunil Sharma (Boston University), Acts of Love: Azad Bilgrami (d. 1785) on Poetic Synthesis and Cultural Translation
Chair: Ian Almond
Wednesday, June 20
10 am — 12 pm
Session 7
Ian Almond (Berlin), Keeping the Turks out of Islam: Goethe’s Ottoman Plan
Oded Schechter (University of Chicago, Fellow of EUME, 2006/7), Translation as secularnational project: the case of Spinoza and Zionism
Chair: Michael Beard