Humanities in translations – translation in humanities. Exploring transfer and reception

Events, Invitations
Photo: Mgr. Mgr. Lucia Drotárová, PhD. Created with the help of AI tool.

Bratislava, Slovakia
May 14, 2025 – doctoral seminar
May 15-16, 2025 – international translation history colloquium in English and French

The colloquium is co-organized by the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava, and CEFRES – French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague. This event is supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the Contract no. APVV-21-0198.

The colloquium brings together translation and humanities scholars from all around the world, experts starting out in the field as well as established prominent figures to explore the circumstances of non-literary transfers and translations (philosophy, sociology, arts, history, linguistics, etc.) and to study the commonalities and differences between Western and Central-Eastern Europe in this respect. The contributions will focus on the following areas of expertise:

  1. histories of humanities translations
  2. translation and transfer of scholarly knowledge and their institutional contexts
  3. concepts, terminology, types of scholarly texts and their argumentation, stylistic conventions
  4. translators and key figures of humanities (case studies)

Apart from a standard conference module with a round table, keynote lecture and sessions, it will also host a doctoral seminar on May 14. Here a specially called up panel of experts consisting of prominent translation and humanities scholars will offer PhD. students greater feedback and an opportunity to discuss their work in detail.

Interpreting into Slovak will be provided. Visitors are welcome to attend the colloquium free of charge and without registration.

The preliminary programs and the original Call for Paper in English and French can be found here:

Provisional Programme / Programme préliminaire / Provisional Programme: Doctoral Seminar

Call for Papers / Appel à communication

“Script-switching in Literary Text” online conference

Miscellaneous

12 March 2025: 8:55 AM – 2:00 PM
13 March 2025: 2:55 PM – 8:00 PM
14 March 2025: 9:55 AM – 5:00 PM

Sign up for Zoom link before 10 March 2025: zerocodeswitching@pm.me
For more information contact Marianna Deganutti (marianna.deganutti@savba.sk)

 

The conference is co-organized by Langueflow, an international research group supported by the University of Bielefeld that focuses on literary multilingualism and the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The event is being held as part of the IMPULZ project Translation and Transfer of Style Across Languages: Towards the Theory of Language Contact in Literature.

This conference brings together scholars from around the world to explore the phenomenon of script-switching in literary texts. The conference’s scope encompasses a range of topics, including the stylistic functions of script-switching in Japanese literature and its connection to multilingualism and translation. Presentations will also examine multi-script usage in various regions, such as Asia, North Africa, and Europe, as well as the significance of script choice in historical documents. The narratological potential of heterography will be explored through the works of authors like Ezra Pound and Anne Carson. Furthermore, the conference will address the role of script in contemporary contexts, including avant-garde drama, K-pop lyrics, art and occult science texts. Four keynotes will be delivered, including one by Haun Saussy and Monika Schmitz-Emans. A book presentation featuring “Writing Beyond Writing” by Tim Brookes is also included in the program. This conference provides a forum for scholarly exchange and discussion on this multifaceted topic.

The full programme and book of abstracts can be found here: https://langueflow.eu/cfp-script-switching-in-literary-texts/

Guest lecture – Multilingual Originals in Translations: The Acoustic Poetics of Invented Names

Invitations

Mónika Dánél
(Univerzita Eötvösa Loránda, Budapešť)

29 January 2025 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82905745792?pwd=agmZq64nniVksvBj0Gzy1upI3fWiq9.1
Meeting ID: 829 0574 5792
Passcode: 422096

 

Ádám Bodor’s novels The Sinistra Zone (1992) and Birds of Verhovina (2011) are set somewhere in a Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Moldavian border zone that appears to be an interface between real and imaginary worlds. Both novels are examples of “commuting grammars,” and are written with a “multilingual self-awareness” (Beáta Thomka 2018) that transmit and translate the multilingual experience and polyphonic cultural memory of East-Central Europe. Bodor’s Hungarian oeuvre evokes the memory of a multi-ethnic community in the past and preserves a continuous oscillation between the inscribed memory of other languages (for example, Armenian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Ruthenian, Transylvanian Saxon, Zipser German, Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish), which are translated by the texts into a Hungarian linguistic and poetic experience. Continue reading Guest lecture – Multilingual Originals in Translations: The Acoustic Poetics of Invented Names →

World Literature Studies 4/2024: Fictional Realities of Eternal Peace

News

ed. Johannes D. Kaminski

The utopian appeal of peace, both in a political and spiritual sense, belongs to the powerful drivers of the human imagination. Yet the rhetorics of peace are difficult to untangle from the realities of war; after all, efforts that supposedly serve a higher purpose frequently result in injustice and violence. In the present issue, an international group of scholars discusses European, American, and Chinese texts that cover a wide spectrum of imagined peace, ranging from naïve enthusiasm for top-down solutions to dejected elegies for the demise of civil liberties.

The journal was published within the project SASPRO World Government: Grand Narratives in Contemporary Science-Fiction.

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 24 €

Articles:
ALEXIS SHOTWELL
“All we have is means”: Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopianism as ongoingness
KILIAN JÖRG
Messy utopianism and the question of war: What does “staying with the trouble” mean in relation to war?
JOHANNES D. KAMINSKI
World-wide conflicts, insular solutions: Universalizing government, language and race in
H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia and Kang Youwei’s The Great Unity
GABRIEL F. Y. TSANG
Mind and peace: The “democratic” info-technological determinism of Gu Junzheng’s “The Dream of Peace”
MICHAEL KA-CHI CHEUK
The Chinese Nobel complex and peacebuilding: Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan as case studies
CATHERINE MACMILLAN
Everyone’s watching you: The future of society in Dave Eggers’s The Every
ANTON MATEJICKA
Totalitarian systems and their peaceful alternatives in Karin Boye’s Kallocain and Olga Ravn’s The Employees
MAGDALENA MÜHLBÖCK
The terrible within the peaceful: Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara
ADAM ŠKROVAN
The pursuit of harmony: Groups and communities in post-apocalyptic narratives
ELAHEH KARIMI RIABI
The image of Persian women in Lomnitsky’s travelogue Persia and Persians

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

PF 2025

PF 2025 – not only with literature…

Warfare runs against the values promoted by liberal democracies. There are situations when peace falls into the same category, such as when authorities impose the
“peace of Ulysses’s comrades”, who languished in the cave of the Cyclops, waiting
their turn to be devoured. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social (1762), this Homeric reference emblemizes the undignified peace that results from submission to power. This is why literary authors, despite their often pacifist convictions, have also provided the most drastic accounts of power constellations when “peace” reveals itself as “pacification”.
World Literature Studies 4/2024 Fictional realities of eternal peace (Johannes D. Kaminski, ed.)

Broadening of Poetics 4: Signs of Culture/Signs of Nature. Semiotics and Poetics in Relation to Sustainable Development

Events, Invitations

28 and 29 October 2024

The Institute of Polish Literature of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences invite you to the International Online Conference Broadening of Poetics 4: Signs of Culture/Signs of Nature Semiotics and Poetics in Relation to Sustainable Development.

Conference organizers:
dr Weronika Lipszyc, dr Anna Tenczyńska, prof. Ewa Szczęsna – The Section of Comparative Studies and the Laboratory of Intersemiotic and Intermedia Research of the Institute of Polish Literature, Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw;
prof. Bogumiła Suwara – The Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

The project is carried out as part of cooperation between the Institute of Polish Literature of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Conference programme HERE.

 

World Literature Studies 3/2024: Translation, Censorship, and Marginalized Voices

News

eds. Ivana Hostová ‒ Mária Kusá

This issue with a focus on translation studies explores the intersection of translation with power, censorship, and marginalized identities. The articles investigate how translation can reinforce or resist oppressive structures, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Themes include the curation of cultural exports, censorship in literary translation, and the political economy of reception. The issue also highlights the role of translators in shaping theoretical works, and advocates for the decolonization of knowledge and greater inclusivity in global cultural production.

The journal was published within the project VEGA 2/0092/23 Translation and translating in the history and present of the Slovak cultural space. Transformations of forms, status and functions: texts, personalities, institutions.

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 24 €

Articles:

IVANA HOSTOVÁ ‒ MÁRIA KUSÁ
Translation, censorship, and marginalized voices: Challenging power and
economic barriers
IRYNA ODREKHIVSKA
Decolonial analytics in translation history: Ukrainian literature in the contested
space of English translation
NATALIIA RUDNYTSKA
Soviet ideological and puritanical censorship of Ukrainian literary translations
MARIE KRAPPMANN
Individual decisions in a collectivist ideology: Two Czech translations of I. L. Peretz’s
short story Bontshe shvayg
MERVE ÖZENÇ KASIMOĞLU
Words in time: Inclusive reading and rewriting in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
KATARÍNA BEDNÁROVÁ
Translation as a scholarly dialogue
IVANA HOSTOVÁ
Translated, transgressed, transported: A century of Whitman in Slovakia
JÁN GAVURA
Publishing poetry in translation in Slovakia 2013–2023
IVANA HOSTOVÁ ‒ DANIELE MONTICELLI ‒ OLEKSANDR KALNYCHENKO
‒ MARTIN DJOVČOŠ
Addressing power imbalances in research and translation studies
EVA VEREBOVÁ ‒ EMÍLIA PEREZ
Theater performances and their accessibility in Slovakia: Insights from the Deaf
community

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

The outstanding publication award from SAS for Johannes D. Kaminsky

Miscellaneous, News


Congratulations to our colleague Johannes D. Kaminsky for the outstanding publication award from SAS for his monograph Lives and Deaths of Werther. Interpretation, Translation, and Adaptation in Europe and East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2023). On September 18, he accepted this special award together with the other SAS researchers from the SAS President Prof. Pavol Šajgalík and the Vice-President for research and innovation, Prof. Peter Samuely.

The monograph’s original research contribution is based on the author’s exceptional linguistic competence and an uncommon comparison of European and Asian reception of Goethe’s novel, analysing non-Eurocentric assessment of one of the most famous works of Western literary culture.

Open access HERE. 

Humanities in Translations – Translation in Humanities. Exploring transfer and reception / Sciences humaines en traduction – traduction des sciences humaines. Questions de transfert et de réception

Events, Invitations

The Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences is organizing in
cooperation with the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University Bratislava and CEFRES the International Colloquium Humanities in Translations – Translation in Humanities. Exploring transfer and reception on 15 and 16 May 2025. The colloquium is part of the APVV research project Translation and aspects of reception of social science and humanities texts as cultural and literary transfer in the 20th century. Colloquium languages: French, English.

Call for Papers / Appel à communication

Application Form / Formulaire d’inscription

Video of Zsolt Czigányik´s talk “Utopia in Central Europe”

Zsolt Czigányik is Associate Professor in the English Department at ELTE, Budapest, and the leader of the research group Democracy in East Central European utopianism funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation at Central European University. He is the secretary of the Utopian Studies Society. His research focus is modern utopian and dystopian literature.

Zsolt Czigányik about his talk: Utopia is situated in no-man’s land between literature, social philosophy and the social sciences, where literary and socio-political factors interact. Historian Péter Hanák has argued that Central Europe is a region where reality and utopia have always mingled. In my presentation I reflect on both concepts: how utopian literary works reflect the social and political reality, and how this genre that stemmed from Western Europe was received and developed in our region. I intend to outline briefly how I understand the concept of utopia and the changing concept of Central Europe in its liminal position between East and West. Based on my studies in English and Hungarian utopian literature, I present our ongoing project as the leader of the Democracy in East Central European utopianism research group that aims to outline the specific features of Central European utopias, such as their national character.

See the video of Zsolt Czigányik´s lecture in English HERE.